We're tackling a lot of engineering challenges that may not actually be solvable. If they are, they'll change a lot of things. If they're not, well, it will be fun to try anyway. We could use your big, magnificent brain to help us find out....

How about someone with no math skills, but quick enough to find the information and claim to have solved the puzzle in an innovative way?

Hehehe, I specially like the "We could use your big, magnificent brain..." portion.

Pretty creative. It sort of flies in the face of billboard marketing, which usually mandates extreme simplicity due to the short exposure time and distraction of piloting a vehicle in traffic. Then again, it's more like one of those "buzz" campaigns - few people will attempt to solve it, they'll just get to work and say, "What the heck was that billboard for?" (and someone will tell them).

Google just demonstrated how local media can be used to achieve global reach via the Internet spin machine.

Yes, they "bought" local media advertising. Then they violated all the common rules about using it, and the result is a highway billboard that reaches millions of people who never even see it, all over the globe.

Put the bait where the fish are.... and use a long enough line to bring them back to where you are.

You are on the money, Paybacksa. Great marketing - get plenty of buzz for under $10K in media expense.

Recently, the restaurant chain Houlihan's ran a series of edgy "nooner" ads promoting their quick lunches. Instead of talking about their food, they used images of sexy twenty-somethings with innuendo-laden captions. The ads were a bit complex for billboards, but the buzz broke into coverage by other local media. I'm sure the chain's marketers were hoping that some conservative group would picket a prominent billboard, but they weren't that lucky.

There's a lesson in this for all of us - creative marketing doesn't have to be expensive. The fact that Google is the advertiser obviously increases the newsworthiness of the story, but it shows that a bit of innovative thinking can trump more massive campaigns.

i once had the misfortune to be involved in a bill board campaign in the UK where one of our 12' x 9's of a flying giant carrot ( in horizontal flight position ) caption something like "the worlds fastest carrot"... found itself next to a 12' x9' of a gorgeous model on all fours facing away from the carrot ...( I forget what the tag line was for the girl it wasn't one of our agency campaigns ) .... I still run across from time to time ( in the "best media bloopers sort of books" ) a photo that some one took of the 2 panels side by side and somewhat compromising juxtaposition ....

sort of thing makes you pay very close attention to where you buy space ...

Has anyone solved this thing yet? All I've been able to figure out so far is that all of the numbers are sequential numbers inside e that add up to 49, but I don't have a calculator that can show me enough digits.

Thanks for the longer version of e. I figured out what the 5th number is and was about to post it but decided against it for the reasons described below. When you figure out the number and log in using it as the password this is what you see:

One thing we learned while building Google is that it's easier to find what you're looking for if it comes looking for you. What we're looking for are the best engineers in the world. And here you are.

As you can imagine, we get many, many resumes every day, so we developed this little process to increase the signal to noise ratio. We apologize for taking so much of your time just to ask you to consider working with us. We hope you'll feel it was worthwhile when you look at some of the interesting projects we're developing right now. You'll find links to more information about our efforts below, but before you get immersed in machine learning and genetic algorithms, please send your resume to us at ********@google.com.

We're tackling a lot of engineering challenges that may not actually be solvable. If they are, they'll change a lot of things. If they're not, well, it will be fun to try anyway. We could use your big, magnificent brain to help us find out.

I didn't post the answer or e-mail address in the answer because of the reasons Google put in the above notice, but it will probably hit the web at some point anyway. Google is probably going to end up changing this screen in a few days, I don't know if anyone else has solved this yet and/or posted the results but someone will and Google will be flooded with resumes from people claiming to have figured it out.

At least now those of you who don't want to work for Google and would never have figured this out on your own won't waste their time or yours :) I haven't done this much math by hand since high school, heh.